Green Mangoes

     I can't believe it's already November! This Tuesday will be my one month mark in Burkina! I've decided to include an interesting note about Burkina in each new blog post. Today I learned that many people in Burkina believe that you can get malaria from eating green mangoes. This is obviously false and part of my job here will be educating communities on malaria prevention and treatment methods.
     I've fallen into a pretty nice schedule. On the weekdays I get home around 6 and am greeted by 20 screaming kids yelling "Natalie! Natalie! Bon soir! Bon arrivèe! Ça va?" I say hello and they all fight over who can carry my bag, bike helmet, water bottle or whatever else I am holding. My Peace Corps friends joke that they can hear the kids welcoming me from their courtyards. Once I get home and settled in, one of the kids usually comes to ask if they can borrow my animal cards to play memory. I hand them over and they all cheer. They usually play cards for the rest of the night, the little ones falling asleep on my patio.
    The other night, as I was getting ready for bed, I saw the women from my courtyard carrying in a bunch of plants on their head. When I looked closer, I realized on the ends of the plants were peanuts. They emptied the pots and began to pick off the peanuts and bag them. There were about 6 women, 4 teenagers and 2 little girls helping. I decided to go over and help. I sat on the ground next to my host sister and tried to show her that I wanted to help. She quickly started yelling and moving her hands up in the air. After, a girl came over and brought me a short stool to sit on. I realized my host sister was yelling because she couldn't believe I would want to sit on the ground in my pajamas. After I got my stool they let me help. News spreads incredibly fast in my village and soon after, all of our neighbors were in our courtyard. They all came to see the white girl picking peanuts. They also explained to me that instead of picking the peanuts off one by one, there is a way to get them all off at the same time. I felt pretty stupid but we got a good laugh out of it. Once we finished I took some pictures. Burkinabè love getting their pictures taken because many of them have never seen photos of themselves. They roar with laughter when they look at them.
    A lot of families in Burkina grow peanuts to sell. My family also sells potatoes. Our local market, called a marché, is on Mondays. However, in Léo, there is a market every day. In the bigger markets, like Léo, I can find cucumbers, homemade peanut butter, scary looking meat and some spices. Markets in the capital have a lot more variety.
     This Wednesday is a big day for us volunteers in Burkina. When I wake up on Wednesday I will know who the president is. We'll also find out our site placement!! This will be my home starting in December and will be the place where I'll live for the next two years! I'm so excited and nervous to find out where I'll be placed. I've had two interviews with my boss about this placement and they do their best to match all the volunteers to the type of site they want. Some of the volunteers, who already tested out of French, found out this week the region where they will be placed. This is because they already started on a local language and local languages are spoken regionally. I find out Wednesday and I'll be sure to upload the blog after!
     Tonight I am going to a dance party in my village. The party was supposed to happen last weekend but someone from my village died so it was cancelled. My host sisters keep checking to make sure I'm going to come, and more importantly if I'm going to dance. I can only imagine the amount of people that will come to see a white girl dance. It's way more entertaining than me picking peanuts, and even that drew a crowd.
      I also learned in French the word for fields (champs) so I was able to ask my family if I could go with them to the fields this weekend. They were excited and my host sister told the rest of my family in Nuni that I wanted to come. On Saturday I followed my friend's host dad to the fields. It was about a ten minute bike ride from our houses. Right now in Burkina it's cultivation season so all of the cotton is ready to be picked. Both women and men work in the fields all day picking cotton. Eventually it will get sold to France. One kilo of cotton is worth 50 cents. We helped the women pick cotton. In our section of the field there were about 30 women, most of them carrying babies on their backs. None of the women spoke French so it was hard to communicate. They did manage to teach us a song that they sing while working. Then, once we had it down, they made us sing it on our own. All 30 women stopped to hear us sing and then laughed for the next fifteen minutes.
   This week one of our sessions in Lèo involved meeting with an organization that worked with people living with HIV and AIDS. They are the only organization in this region that works with this population. They provide testing, counseling, family sessions and home visits. They also help financially support people from Lèo and surrounding areas. The organization covers 80% of medical bills if patients need to buy medicine. Many of the people they work with contract malaria or other sicknesses, because people living with HIV/AIDS have weaker immune systems and the amount of medicine they have to buy can be really expensive. This organization also collaborates with a few other local groups that help people living with HIV/AIDS start their own money making projects. The organization currently recieves their funding from a Belgium organization.  However, they informed us that they are stopping the funding in 2013. They said it will be devastating if they can't find another organization to provide funding. The hospital in Lèo only has two doctors that can write prescriptions for HIV/AIDS medicine. Since they have so few resources, these doctors only have time to write up these prescriptions. They can't provide counseling or explain how to use the medication. This is a huge problem because the medicine needs to be taken at the same time everyday, on a full stomach, and there are a lot of side effects. If they don't learn how to use the medicine, the medicine won't work. It was really interesting to speak to members of the organization and brainstorm ways that Peace Corps volunteers can collaborate with organizations like this. At the end of the session they asked us if we knew any organizations from the states that provided funding to these types of organizations. We said we would try to brainstorm and if anyone reading this blog has suggestions, I'm all ears! Hope everyone back home had a good weekend! Be sure to check out my photos on Facebook! N